Tag Archives: JR

I love collaborating with Yoshiko Maruiwa (@NewYork564) every year on a variety of projects. Yoshiko is a wonderful artist and teacher, and she introduces me and our students to art and artists that put our units in a larger context, from Cindy Sherman to Robert Frank to Louise Bourgeois.

Yoshiko and I just led a Digital Arts mini-course that lasted for 8 sessions. (Other courses offered were mixed media, batik, and ceramics.) Our small group of students completed three photo manipulation projects. Below is their description of each project and the resulting images:

Project 1: InsideOut CollageInspired by the artist, JR, the 8th grade artists from Digital Art course created our own interpretations of his classic “InsideOut” artwork. During this assignment, we created a collage of images to represent our inside stories, using images that are important to us. Through the following slides you will see different representations of who the students are and what inspires us.

Project 2: InsideOut PhotoThe INSIDE OUT project by the French artist JR gives everyone the opportunity to share their portrait and make a statement for what they stand for. It is a global platform for people to share their untold stories and transform messages of personal identity into works of public art. Inspired by his project, we took black and white photos that conveyed our social action project.

Project 3: Social Action Digital CollageFor this project we took our Social Action Projects (SAP) and turned them into digital art. We collaged and layered pictures until they came together to represent the injustice we are focusing on for our SAP. One requirement was that we had to be in the picture, so it was a challenge to include ourselves in pictures that we found on the internet.

Exhibition on View Monday, May 5 – Tuesday, June 10
The School at Columbia University, 556 West 110th Street, 5th floor windows

April 24, 2014 – New York, NY
In the next week, a new addition to Broadway will appear. Students at The School at Columbia University are participating in the Inside Out project and displaying photographs of their faces as a way of combatting injustices they see.

The soon-to-graduate eighth graders chose a theme to portray through their portraits. Their theme for this project was to “See, Hear, and Speak.” Their goal was to fight against injustice, and they wanted to do that through photography and art. The project is a showcase of black and white photographs of each and every eighth-grader (and their teachers) posing. Their poses stand for either seeing, hearing, or speaking. To see, hear, and speak really is how they thought to best tackle the injustices in the world. This project is their first of many having to do with injustice and speaking out.

This project is part of the larger Inside Out project, coordinated by the French artist JR, started three years ago after he won the TED Prize for his photography installations. His work started as a signal to raise awareness around riots going on in Paris in 2004, then soon escalated to much more than that. Armed with just a 28-millimeter lens, JR then decided to travel to Israel and Palestine to photograph Palestinians and Israelis of the same profession, then post pictures on the wall separating them from one another. He then went on to photograph women in poor neighborhoods (a project called “Women Are Heroes”) to empower them and to make the neighborhood more beautiful. He has three current projects: “Unframed,” “The Wrinkles of the City,” and “Inside Out,” where he takes ordinary people’s photographs and turns them into works of art and social action.

The installation will be put up this week. The images will be displayed on the windows of The School’s art studio, printed on 2 x 3 foot posters. There will be over 60 portraits directly facing Broadway. Come and look at their portraits on the corner of 110th and Broadway, and get inspired to see, hear, or speak!

In previous years, I partnered with Yoshiko Maruiwa to lead an Inside Out elective for about 13 students. This year, the whole Art Team is on board! I’m so excited that Kim Lane, Lindsay Calhoun, and Katelin O’Hare have joined forces with me and Yoshiko to make the project an even richer and more collaborative experience. Our theme is See, Hear, Speak and addresses the students’ pledge to speak out against injustice that they witness in the world.

I’ll upload our group action to the official Inside Out Project website, and we’ll receive large format posters (3′ x 5′) to offer our students. In the meantime, I’m totally taking advantage of our HP Designjet T120 to make smaller versions (2′ x 3′) to hang in the numerous window panes of our Art Studio. The students are hanging their portraits on Wednesday, and it’s going to be amazing…